Custom & headless
Custom & Headless Development Beyond the Platform
Some commerce problems are not theme problems. A marketplace with two sides to onboard, a storefront that has to render a catalogue no platform models properly, a buying experience that starts somewhere other than a product page, those need building. We do that work in Next.js, usually against a commerce backend rather than replacing one, and we are straight with you about when it is not worth it.
Book a callWhen the platform stops being the answer
Every commerce platform is a set of assumptions about how selling works: there is a catalogue, products have variants, a customer adds them to a cart and checks out. Most businesses fit those assumptions, and for those businesses fighting the platform is a waste of money. We say that on the Shopify page and we mean it here too.
Some businesses do not fit. A marketplace has two sides, each with its own onboarding, permissions and reporting. A brand selling configured or made-to-order products has a product model no variant system expresses. A business whose customers discover products somewhere physical needs the path from that moment to a completed purchase to be about four seconds long. In each case the platform is not slow or limited; it is modelling something else.
That is the line. If the platform models your business and you want it faster or prettier, that is theme and performance work. If it models something that is not your business, you are looking at custom development, and doing it as a pile of workarounds on top of a theme costs more over three years than building it once.
What we build
- Next.js storefronts against Shopify, Magento or a headless commerce API
- Custom commerce platforms where no off-the-shelf product models the business
- Marketplace and multi-sided platforms: onboarding, permissions, operations tooling
- Technical SEO for JavaScript-rendered storefronts, where most headless builds go wrong
- API and integration work: ERP, PIM, fulfilment, payments, bespoke checkout flows
- AI integration that does a specific job, search, product data enrichment, support triage
- Generative engine optimization and AI readiness, so answer engines can parse the site
- Performance engineering as a property of the build rather than a later project
Wellocated: a marketplace with two sides
An end-to-end platform delivered from product strategy and UX through engineering and deployment. The core problem was not a storefront: it was a two-sided marketplace connecting venues with brands, where the purchase happens in a physical space rather than on a product page. Built in Next.js. The full write-up is linked under Proof above.
- Venue onboarding and management, with the operational tooling to run it at scale
- Brand placement booking, the two-sided transaction the marketplace exists for
- Marketplace operations: the reporting and administration both sides depend on
- QR-to-checkout purchasing, turning in-venue discovery into an immediate sale
How the work runs
Shape it
Before architecture: what the business actually does, where the current setup fights it, and whether this needs custom development at all. Occasionally the honest answer is that it does not, and that conversation is cheaper now than in month four.
Prove the hard part
Every project of this kind has one genuinely uncertain piece, a data model, an integration, a rendering strategy. We build that first, in isolation, so the risk is retired while it is still cheap to change direction.
Build in increments
Two-week increments against a deployed environment you can use. Not screenshots, not a demo branch, the thing, running, so feedback is about behaviour rather than intent.
Run it
Custom software needs an owner after launch. We either keep that role, monitoring, dependency updates, the next increment, or hand over to your team with the documentation and access to take it on properly.
Headless is not automatically faster
This deserves saying plainly, because it is sold the other way round. Going headless replaces a mature, cached, server-rendered storefront with an application you now own the performance of. Done well, that is faster; you control every byte, and there is no theme doing work you did not ask for. Done ordinarily, it is a React bundle, a waterfall of API calls and a Largest Contentful Paint worse than the theme it replaced.
The same applies to technical SEO, harder. A JavaScript-rendered storefront has to solve rendering for crawlers, canonical handling, pagination and structured data explicitly, because none of it comes free any more. This is the single most common way headless projects lose money: traffic drops after launch and the cause is a rendering strategy nobody scrutinised. So technical SEO is a requirement we write down at the start of a headless build, alongside the performance budget, rather than an audit somebody runs afterwards.
So we treat both as requirements with numbers attached from the start, not as a phase near the end. This site is the small version of that argument; it ships no JavaScript at all, because for a marketing site none was needed. The right architecture is the one the problem calls for.
Custom development with an Atlanta team
Custom work is the service where proximity actually matters. A headless build or a bespoke platform starts with weeks of working out what the business does, and that goes faster in a room than on a call. Being an Atlanta team means we can do that part in person for brands here, which is why most of our custom platform work starts with local clients.
For everyone else it is US-hours overlap and the same small team. What does not change is who you talk to: the engineers who write the code, not an account layer describing what they think the engineers are doing.
AI, where it does a job
AI integration is worth paying for when it does something specific and measurable: search that understands what a customer means rather than matching strings, product data enrichment across a catalogue too large to write by hand, support triage that routes accurately. Each of those replaces identifiable work, and each is a normal engineering project with an AI-shaped component rather than a category of its own.
They are not worth building because the category is fashionable. A chat widget that answers questions your FAQ already covers adds latency and a support burden. We will build either, but we will tell you which one we think you asked for.
The adjacent work is more valuable for most brands and much less discussed: making sure answer engines can read your site at all. Clean structured data, a crawlable content model, and machine-readable summaries of what you sell. This site publishes an llms.txt and serves Markdown renditions of its pages for exactly that reason.
Proof
A two-sided marketplace for venue-based brand discovery
A two-sided Next.js marketplace connecting venues and brands, with QR-to-checkout purchasing in the venue itself.
A B2C storefront for an independent luxury fashion brand
A Magento 2 storefront for a luxury womenswear and headwear brand, built for brand presentation and speed.
Questions
Custom & headless: common questions
Can't find the answer you're looking for? Reach out to our team for a personalized consultation.
Should we go headless?
Probably not, if your business fits what your platform models and your complaint is speed or design, theme and performance work is far cheaper and usually gets you there. Headless earns its cost when the storefront experience genuinely cannot be expressed in the platform, or when commerce is one part of a larger application.
Will a Next.js storefront hurt our SEO?
It can, and this is where these projects most often go wrong. Rendering for crawlers, canonical handling, pagination and structured data all have to be designed deliberately rather than inherited from the platform. Done properly it is fine; done as an afterthought it costs traffic that takes months to win back.
Can you work with our existing backend?
Usually yes, most of this work is a new front end against a commerce API you already have, whether that is Shopify, Magento or something bespoke. Replacing the backend as well is a much larger project and worth avoiding unless the backend is the actual problem.
What happens after launch?
Custom software needs an owner. We either keep that role on a retainer covering monitoring, dependency updates and the next increment, or we hand over with documentation and access so your team can. What does not work is nobody owning it, which is how a custom platform becomes a legacy system in two years.
Do you still work with Magento?
Yes. We have deep Magento experience and still take Magento development work, including for stores that have decided to stay. We have published open source Magento modules, which is a reasonable signal of how far into that platform we go.
Related services
Shopify Development & Support for DTC Brands
Themes, migrations, integrations and ongoing support for DTC brands on Shopify and Shopify Plus.
Shopify Speed Optimization That Moves Rankings and Revenue
Core Web Vitals diagnosed from field data, fixed at the source, and monitored so the store does not quietly slow down again.
Product Information Management, Implemented Right
Pimcore, Salsify and BlueStone PIM implementations, integrated with the storefront and the systems that feed it.
Tell us what your store needs to do.
Send a short note about the platform you're on and what's in the way. You'll get a reply from an engineer, usually within one business day, not a sales sequence.